Keynote Address

September 18, 1998

Donald Kennedy

I was going to start out with the answer to the question I know is on all your minds,
namely what the hell is he doing here? And of course, I am first of all a
grateful visitor at the nations most famous and most favorite academical village.
But second, I am here to be an observant outsider and, as John put it to you, a friendly
reactor to your plans as they develop. I have a great admiration for serious planning
processes and its plain that this institution has begun what will be a very serious,
and I hope very productive process.

But I am very much still on the upward trajectory of a learning curve. I spent from
last night through this morning talking to faculty members in different groups, asking
questions and listening as carefully as I could. And it would be premature, obviously, for
me to give you any conclusions at this point. But I do have some observations about the
planning process, and I hope some of them may strike a helpful note for some of you.

The first thing that I want to start out with is plain to everybody who knows anything
about higher education in America. What you have here by way of starting materials is
fine, and that you ought to observe Hippocrates first aphorism as you go through
this business, namely, first do no harm. Dont foul it up. Its
awfully good.

Second, planning is important, but it is also hard. Its hard for two reasons.
Its hard for people outside the enterprise always to understand that making change
(which is what planning really is) is not a confession of weakness. The best institutions
in the world all want to get better. And the very best ones strive at it relentlessly.
Levi-Strauss, the Environmental Defense Fund, the American Museum of National History, the
World Bank (if you dont disagree too radically) and the Atlanta Braves all strive
relentlessly to get better, even though almost everybody in the world knows that
theyre pretty good to begin with. But, announcing a commitment to growth and change
is not risk-free. The fact is that ambition sometimes does get confused with admission of
weakness whenever institutions plan.

So its natural that when they do a tough self-assessment at the beginning of the
planning process somebody out there takes it as a kind of indictment of what is already
there. I dont know what to tell you about that, except that the people who react in
that way are dumb. And that they cant hurt you very much. As Mark Twain once said
about the music of Wagner, "Its really not as bad as it sounds." So,
persevere. Do the hard things. Say where you think you need to get better, and never mind
if people think that that amounts to a confession of weakness.

Next, I want to talk about some fundamental decisions that one reaches when one embarks
on this voyage of improvement. The designation of particular areas as candidates for
growth doesnt necessarily indicate that those areas are not performing well. If you
think about it, there are three reasons why you might pick school A, or department B or
program C as a candidate for attention in a process of the kind that youve got under
way. The first one is that you believe that there is some need for improvement 
thats the one everybody will leap to.

The second one is that there is an opportunity for improvement. That is, that the
discipline represented in that program or department, or the other kinds of opportunities
that are available to it, or the needs that are out there in the community dictate that
the institution has to make this a higher profile, or more active, or better-supported
activity. Theres an opportunity there.

And the third is that there is a capacity for growth and change. That the internal
morale, the feelings of people inside about their own destinies, their capacity to make
change and their willingness to undergo the risks that it takes, are also present. And
that the quality at the start is adequate to ensure that there is a platform to build on.

So, its not right to invite or to reach the immediate conclusion that because
some organizational element is on the list, that means that theyve been identified
as deficient. It may be exactly the reverse - that theres a real chance to do
something there thats exciting.

Now, embodied in the decision about what to pay attention to ¼ and now here again
Im going to do the dangerous thing of reflecting back on internal perceptions of
quality¼ is where you put your attention. Is it on the places where some combination of
need, capacity and opportunity suggest that there is real building to be done? Or is it to
invest the marginal dollar and the marginal unit of attention in elements that are already
strong?

I will tell you, that one of the topics that has come up repeatedly in conversations in
the last sixteen or seventeen hours, has been a question about whether the University of
Virginia, in thinking about its own investments in change, should focus on a number of
areas in which it is nationally recognized as being at the very top of a field. Or whether
instead it should devote its attention to departments and programs that are not highly
ranked.

Im going to take a little risk here and call your attention to a hard lesson I
had in this once. Stanford University is partly known as the farm because it has a lot of
acreage, and on this acreage it has a lot of roads, some of which are public highways that
take community members from point A to point B. Theres about 200 miles of them. And
some of them are pretty good roads, and some of them, I assure you, are absolutely awful.
And we had a meeting at one time to decide whether we would invest in repairing Palm
Drive, which for those of you who have been on our campus, is the extension of University
Avenue that extends between all the palm trees with the view of the chapel mosaic in the
back and the foothills behind you. Brings a tear to the eye. But it brings a tear to the
eye largely because you cannot navigate it without going over potholes large enough to
conceal Volkswagens. It has been, until recently, a terrible road. So we had a meeting
about how to allocate limited highway resources. And, I said innocently, "Look guys,
weve got to fix Palm Drive. Everybody is really furious about Palm Drive." Then
I got a lecture in the marginal return of allocation of money in highway repairs. It turns
out that per dollar, you get more extended use, and more value by far, from making a good
road better than you get from making a lousy road ok. And so, economically, it looks like
a slam-dunk. And my advisors were saying we really should pay some attention to campus
drive. But eventually I had to point out that there were after all, still going to be
people who have to use Palm Drive and theres only a certain length of time that
people will tolerate the coexistence of very good and not good at all. That it seems as
though the institution has made a terrible decision. And besides, some of the things that
may initially not look so good are pretty essential elements if the entire system is to
work.

Well, I proceed with considerable trepidation from highways to academic disciplines,
but let me use the metaphor in the following way. No responsible university can afford to
permit important elements that ought to be part of the intellectual armamentarium of
educated men and women to slide into total disrepair. You cant do that. And there
are two reasons why. The first is that you owe some attention to those fields to your
students or you are going to give them a warped picture of the structure of human
knowledge.

But second, its terribly important to recognize that things change. Opportunity
strikes where you dont expect it. I should imagine that the dons of Oxford and
Cambridge would have been embarrassed to read in 1875, the academic plan for the life
sciences at Oxford and Cambridge that was made in 1855, five years before the publication
of the Origin of Species. Who would have known that the relative importance of entire
disciplines was to be altered by a single stunning, wonderful revolution. And in the same
way, of course, economic opportunity, exciting insights in philosophy or in the humanistic
disciplines, changes in how we feel about various forms of art - all these kinds of
arriving events change and often change abruptly. How we would feel about investment in
these different disciplines.

So, somehow, I think in any sensible planning process, youve got to come to grips
with the fact that you cant do everything at least you cant do
everything superbly. But in seeking a balance, you need to have some attention to what an
old Stanford provost called Fred Turman once famously labeled Steeples of Excellence. The
areas where you build concentrations of people so that you can develop a very special
niche, which you colonize better than anybody else. And the maintenance of a whole set of
important disciplines at more than adequate, and if possible, excellent levels.

Returning to that theme and that dilemma from time to time, I think, is going to be an
essential part of your process. I hope very much that you will find yourself doing it.

Well, finally I have a few suggestions about notions, themes you might keep in mind as
you go through this process.

The first and most important probably, is that it is absolutely going to need broad
involvement of faculty and staff and students, if it is to have the kind of propulsion
from investment, sub-cost that its going to need to get finished. Unless there are
lots of participants whose participation has made them believers in the goal, then I think
it may meet the fate of so many other processes.

Its the worst thing in the world to be stuck up on some shelf some place and ten
years from now a group of faculty will get together and say "Gee, we really need to
sort out this business of so and so" And then somebody will say, "Gosh,
Ive been around here a long time. I remember back in 98 we started a long-term
planning process and everybody worked very hard and there was a terrific report published.
Lets see if I can find it." You dont want anybody, five or ten years from
now, having to look around and scramble through old archives to find the results of this
process  it ought to be living and breathing in the institution, and people need to
remember it as a watershed event. But unless there are lots of people engaged and lots of
people therefore loyal to the outcome, thats not going to happen.

Second, a thought or two on direction. Interdisciplinary and problem-oriented research
is becoming a lot more important. Interdisciplinary teaching is becoming a way of life
here as I learned today. New program combinations can be very powerful and very
attractive, and they are ways of rekindling enthusiasm in people who may have been in
their particular teaching or scholarly ruts for a little bit too long.

That takes me to a more general point about how you think in a planning process. It is
so easy to be incremental and marginal. It is so easy to take what is already there as
given and then say, "What might happen if we expanded A by 5% and reduced B by
5%" and not think about dramatic and perhaps painful organizational changes that
might make a huge difference. I wouldnt dream of suggesting any particular ones, but
Ill tell you that people who have been engaged in this kind of planning have, for
example, looked at connections between Biology and Chemistry and Arts and Sciences and the
basic medical sciences. Or they have thought about the combination of fields like
Political Economy, Environmental Science (which you already have), Cognitive Studies,
Biological Anthropology. You could list without difficulty ten or fifteen combination
disciplines that are succeeding here and there, including quite possibly already here,
that might need different institutional homes or a different place in institutional
organization.

And the last of these context-for-change points is something that I actually feel
fairly strongly about, and I will conclude with it. I want to cite some personal
skepticism about certain directions that are now being pushed on many universities, mostly
from the outside, sometimes a little from the inside. And, I guess part of my conviction
on this point results from my own travels here and there, where as a result of my now
almost 40 years of association with Stanford, I am asked, "How can we make X name a
valley?" "How can we make X, Silicon Valley?" And what I have to answer to
the first question is, "Why would you want to do that?"

To the next question, because most people who say it havent really thought it
through, the second thing I have to say is that that particular set of connections between
Stanford and a very active nexus of high-tech industry came about through a series of
accidents that I think are very unlikely to be repeated elsewhere for reasons that have
nothing to do with the quality of the climate of the region and the intellectual quality
of the people of whatever university is asking the question. Its just that too many
things had to come together, and the probability of that happening elsewhere, I happen to
believe is not very high.

But this view of mine is also a product of a belief that Im afraid the
universities contributed to during the international competitiveness euphoria of the
1980s, and it is the notion that one of the highest and best uses of the university is to
become an engine for regional economic recovery. And I think there is a lot of nonsense
being said about that. Were hearing a lot of it. Were seeing some flashy
claims on the part of up and coming universities that they should be invested in because
they are potential sources of economic recovery and well-being for their regions. Not only
do I doubt that that case can be convincingly made in most places. Its also my view
that it depends on a deepness of understanding of what happens in the process of
technology transfer.

Technology transfer is not the migration of good ideas out some institutional
smokestack, and it is not the production of patentable devices or the development of
spin-off companies. Technology transfer, 90 percent of it, takes place in the brains of
people walking out of universities with degrees in their hands and new ideas in their
heads. Thats how technology moves from place to place. And to the extent that
universities really can lay claim to being engines to economic reconfiguration, it is
because they do a superb job of educating young men and women through a deep commitment to
scholarship and teaching. I think in the long run, keeping ones eye on those
fundamentals is essential in any planning process like this. In that regard, I ask myself
already, is the University of Virginia a success at these deep fundamentals, and the
answer is: hugely. Can it get even better? Of course. Good luck with this process. I am
going to enjoy watching it.